Kamienica Hallerowska, Kraków

Kamienica Hallerowska is the historic townhouse at 16 Saint John Street in Kraków’s Old Town. Its name recalls the Haller family, who owned it through much of the mid-seventeenth century and reshaped the building’s plan, including the staircase section and the roof. Yet its fabric reaches much further back: it began in the late fourteenth century as a single ground-floor room, then gained an upper storey and a rear wing during the fifteenth century.

Find the date 1746 set into the keystone of the main stone doorway. That marks a major repair and alteration, although the façade you see was substantially recast again in 1824. Its restrained classical dress means an orderly, antique-inspired design: a balanced three-bay front, shallow projections, moulded horizontal bands, and plaster ornament above the first-floor windows.

The central window has a triangular cap; the outer pair carry rounded pediments with sculpted shells. Behind this composed street front are far older survivals. The cellars retain fifteenth-century stone doorways and vaulted chambers, while a former entrance hall contains a late-fifteenth-century Gothic portal.

The ground floor was altered for shops in 1908, and its rooms were adapted again in 2009. The house has been protected as a historic monument since the fourteenth of March 1966.